What’s the best translation of Madame Bovary? (Part 1)

Who was Eleanor Marx-Aveling?

She was the youngest daughter of Karl Marx, a socialist, a writer, and a translator. As translator and editor, she worked with her father and Friedrich Engels on Das Kaptial. She also translated some of Henrik Ibsen’s plays from Norwegian to English.

About the Marx-Aveling translation of Madame Bovary

The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation edited by Peter France
“Her plain version, though not attempting to match Flaubert’s style, stands comparison with several of the later versions.”

“Eleanor Marx and Gustave Flaubert” by Faith Evans
“It was the first English translation to appear and remained the only English version for many years, and although several more have been undertaken in the past half-century it remains among the most readable. Yet for reasons that I believe were sometimes unconnected with the translation itself, it has often suffered harshly at the hands of the critics. Vladimir Nabokov, for instance, in his reading of Madame Bovary, rages against translators in general – ‘ignorant, treacherous and philistine’ – and Marx in particular. Lectures on Literature, published after his death, reproduces a page from his teaching notebook in which he lists what he considers to be some of her mistakes.”

Paul de Man, whose edited version was published in 1965, says in his introduction: “[T]he Marx Aveling text has advantages and drawbacks. One of its main virtues is the relatively high degree of fidelity in rendering the cadence of Flaubert’s sentence… [but] Mrs. Aveling often loses track of the meaning in the meditative, inward passages and renders the already obscure original altogether opaque.”

From Marx-Aveling’s introduction to the 1886 and 1892 editions reproduced on the blog Exotic and Irrational Entertainment:
“Certainly no critic can be more painfully aware than I am of the weaknesses, shortcomings, the failures of my work; but at least the translation is faithful. I have neither suppressed a line, nor added a word. That often I have not found the best possible word to express Flaubert’s meaning I know; but those who have studied him will understand how impossible it must be for any one to give an exact reproduction of the inimitable style of the master. . . My work, then, I know is faulty. It is pale and feeble by the side of the original. Yet, if it induces some readers to go to that original, if it helps to make known to those who cannot thus study this work of the greatest of French novelists after Balzac, I am content. . . I do not regret having done this work; it is the best I could do.”

“Flaubert’s Voice: Retranslating Madame Bovary” by Geoffrey Wall
“She turned to the translation of Madame Bovary in the years just after her father’s death. In some sense, translation was an escape from the kind of intellectual work that would have connected her with her father. Curious to think of the daughter of Karl Marx immersing herself so intimately in the bourgeois world. Eleanor Marx, as far as I can tell, was bilingual or trilingual. German was spoken at home. English was not her first language. It must have been her third language, after Polish and French. You can tell because she writes English with a perpetual engaging oddity. She escaped the flowing style. Her translation achieves an austere literalism, which I greatly admire. She respects sentence boundaries and she respects the syntactical order of the original. Unfortunately, she mangles the poetic moments. Her translation falls down at those moments where Flaubert has invested, imaginatively, in his subject-matter.”

Extract from the Marx-Aveling translation of Madame Bovary

Get the Marx-Aveling translation of Madame Bovary

Since this translation is in the public domain, there are many print versions and also some free ebooks available. See below. There is also an edited version published by Norton.

About the Blaydes translation of Madame Bovary

The Blaydes translation was published by P.F. Collier & Son in New York with a 39-page introduction by Henry James and a 3-page biography of Flaubert by Edmund Gosse. It was illustrated with color facsimiles of paintings by George Jeanniot.

I assume the translation is complete.

Extract from the Blaydes translation of Madame Bovary

Get the Blaydes translation of Madame Bovary

You can find scans online at Hathi Trust:

Visit Hathi Trust

See the copies of the Blaydes translation available from antiquarian booksellers:

Search Abebooks

Who was Henry Blanchamp?

Worldcat lists him as the translator of works originally in French or German, by authors including Honoré de Balzac and Guy de Maupassant.

About the Blanchamp translation of Madame Bovary

It’s an obscure, abridged translation published in the Lotus Library series of Greening & Co. in 1905.

“Flaubert and the retranslation of Madame Bovary” by Sharon Deane
“[T]his edition may wish to strike a balance between readability, titillation and decorum. As to its persistence, the Blanchamp translation is only reissued twice (1910; 1929) and hereafter falls into obscurity.”

Who was James Lewis May?

He was an English author, translator, and publisher. He wrote studies of writers such as George Eliot and Charles Lamb and on Catholic subjects.

About the May translation of Madame Bovary

The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation edited by Peter France
The May and Hopkins translations “aim for an English style worthy of the original; in doing so, they reshape Flaubert’s sentences, lightening them and making them flow more easily.”

“Flaubert and the retranslation of Madame Bovary” by Sharon Deane
It was “presented in a luxurious, illustrated edition. Although ungenerously described by one reviewer as ‘one of those unfriendly monumental tomes which make a meretricious bid for popularity at Christmas time’, the same nevertheless welcomes the translator’s efforts, claiming that ‘Mr. May has given us Madame Bovary in a more becoming English dress than any of those who have hitherto attempted the insurmountable task’ “. May’s introduction casts doubt on the legitimacy of previous translations, implying that his will serve the author better. Nevertheless, “this particular translation still pales in quantitative comparison against the deluge of reprints of the Marx-Aveling version [albeit in part for financial reasons].”

Get the May translation of Madame Bovary

See the copies of the May translation available from antiquarian booksellers:

Search Abebooks

Who was Gerard Hopkins?

Gerard Manley Hopkins was an English poet and Jesuit priest.

About the Hopkins translation of Madame Bovary

The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation edited by Peter France
The May and Hopkins translations “aim for an English style worthy of the original; in doing so, they reshape Flaubert’s sentences lightening them and making them flow more easily…. Hopkins in particular writes with freedom and flourish, producing a readable, very English-sounding text.”

“Flaubert and the retranslation of Madame Bovary” by Sharon Deane
“[T]he Hopkins translation is taken up by Oxford University Press in 1959: it is at this point that we can note the very beginnings an evident competition between the houses of Penguin and OUP as far as the publication of Madame Bovary is concerned…. In 1981, OUP take the decision to reissue a revised version of Hopkins’s translation, replacing his foreword with an extensive introduction by the Oxford academic Terence Cave, and including a wealth of explanatory notes. Inherent in this move is a conscious attempt to appeal to a specifically academic market, along with evidence that the publishers hold with the ‘new equals improved’ ethos.”

“Flaubert’s Voice: Retranslating Madame Bovary” by Geoffrey Wall
“I felt that Gerard Hopkins (1949) made Flaubert flow too swift and smooth by altering sentence boundaries, by changing psychological verbs such as “songer”. Hopkins’ translation is a pleasantly readable approximation to Flaubert. I respected that, and yet I wanted something more demanding, more textured.”

Extract from the Hopkins translation of Madame Bovary

Get the Hopkins translation of Madame Bovary

The Hopkins translation is still under copyright but out-of-print. You may be able to find a second-hand copy. See below.

Who is Joan Charles?

According to Worldcat, she also translated Stendahl’s The Red and the Black and wrote novels.

About the Charles translation of Madame Bovary

The translation was issued by International Collectors Library with illustrations by Ben Stahl. I believe those copies contain a complete translation.

The Paris Review: “The Sins of a Translator” by Lydia Davis
This edition “follows the original very closely—she wouldn’t dream of adding or omitting material with the writerly flair of, for instance, Francis Steegmuller (American, 1957) or Gerard Hopkins (English 1948) [but] I came to see her as tight-laced and humorless.”

However! I believe the copies published by John C. Winston Co (or, presumably, Holt Rinehart & Winston) are abridged. They have the illustrations by Ben Stahl but they say “edited by William Somerset Maugham” and possibly render the title as “Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary”. They belong to the series Maugham created called “Ten greatest novels of the world.”

My Maugham Collection: “W. Somerset Maugham and His 10 Best Novels of All Time”
“Maugham was approached by the publisher John C. Winston to reissue the 10 novels on his list, inviting him to write a preface for each and abridge the volumes.”

Extract from the Charles translation of Madame Bovary

Get the Charles translation of Madame Bovary

See the copies of the Charles translation available from antiquarian booksellers:

Search Abebooks

About the Russell translation of Madame Bovary

The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation edited by Peter France
It is a “fluent” translation in the tradition of a tendency to “domesticate”.

The Atlantic: “No Way, Madame Bovary” by Clive James
The article says that Mauldon’s only improvement to Russell’s work is to change his use of the N-word to “black man”. “I can’t find even one other word in Russell’s translation that sounds dated in the wrong way. All the rest of it sounds dated in the right way—that is, closer to Flaubert in time. It must also be said… that most of it is closer to Flaubert in possessing a sense of style.”

Extract from the Russell translation of Madame Bovary

Get the Russell translation of Madame Bovary

The Russell translation is still under copyright but out-of-print. You may be able to find a second-hand copy. See below.

Who was Francis Steegmuller?

Francis Steegmuller was a prolific American writer and translator. His stories appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere; he published a number of novels; he published biographies and other non-fiction; he translated and published a volume of selected letters of Flaubert’s and a “double portrait” entitled Flaubert and Madame Bovary.

» NYT Obituary

About the Steegmuller translation of Madame Bovary

The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation edited by Peter France
“He is not always precise in his rendering of Flaubert’s meaning, he tends to interpret, and he treats the syntax quite freely. Nevertheless, his translation, as well as being highly readable, generally comes closer than the others to rendering the sense of Flaubert’s narrative and dialogue, his irony, and his poetry.

The London Review of Books: “Writer’s Writer and Writer’s Writer’s Writer” by Julian Barnes
After a long discussion of the ins and outs of translation, and of the recent Davis translation, Barnes says: “If you want a freer translation, Steegmuller is best.”

Extract from the Steegmuller translation of Madame Bovary

Who is Lowell Bair?

He translated numerous works from French, including: The Red and the Black by Stendhal; Candide by Voltaire; Dangerous Liaisons by Choderlos de Laclos; Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand; The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas; The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Ninety-Three by Victor Hugo; From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne; The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux; Nana by Emile Zola; Eugenie Grandet by Honoré de Balzac.

Extract from the Bair translation of Madame Bovary

Extract from the Marmur translation of Madame Bovary

Who was Paul de Man?

Paul de Man (Paul Adolph Michel Deman) was a Belgian-born American literary critic.

About the de Man translation of Madame Bovary

This is a revised version of the original 1886 English translation.

From the introduction: “The Victorian diction has, in part, been modernized. Flaubert’s original paragraphs, a fundamental and subtly measured unit of composition, have been restored throughout. Several misleading inaccuracies and mistranslations have been corrected.”

The Paris Review: “Some notes on Translation and on Madame Bovary” by Lydia Davis
This edition “exists for a couple of wrong reasons, and people buy it for another wrong reason. Wrong reason number one: Norton chose to use the Marx Aveling translation because it was in the public domain and wouldn’t cost anything (I’m assuming this, or I was told—I can’t remember which). Wrong reason number two (I’m certainly guessing here): They asked Paul de Man to revise and edit it not because he was conscientious and an excellent writer in English but because he had prestige, a reputation, and scholarly intelligence. He then apparently handed most or all of the work over to his wife, and did not acknowledge her. (This I was told by a reliable source.) Wrong reason number three: People buy the book not because it is an excellent translation of this important novel, but because the volume includes informative essays and other useful critical apparatuses.”

The Globe and Mail: Review by Jane Smiley of the Davis translation
The de Man translation “reads like an academic exercise.”

Extract from the de Man translation of Madame Bovary

Get the de Man translation of Madame Bovary

This edition is out of print. There is a revised Norton edition edited by Margaret Cohen.

What’s in Part 2?

• translations by Wall, Mauldon, MacKenzie, Moncrieff, Davis, and Thorpe, plus the latest revised edition of Marx-Aveling
• other information and resources (including a book by Steegmuller on the author and his controversial novel)

If you just want a quick-and-dirty recommendation on which translation to choose, jump to the conclusion of Part 2.

Go to the start of Part 2